After much research and try & error, I was able to determine that VMWare Horizon Client requires up to 4GB of RAM for physical machines and 5GB of RAM for virtualized Windows 7, 8.1, 10 systems (VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation).

Modify /etc/libvirtd/qemu.conf to run the QEMU processes under the libvirtd group. You did add your user to the libvirtd group right? 😉

# The group ID for QEMU processes run by the system instance.
group = "libvirtd"

Reboot your server.

Create a new Windows 7 virtual machine but we will need to customize the settings:

Choose Spice as the Display adaptor:

Change Video hardware to QXL:

For sound, choose the appropriate hardware:

Windows 7 (32bit): ac97

Windows 7 (64bit): ich6

Windows Server 2008: ich6

Windows Vista (64bit): ich6

Windows Vista (32bit): ac97

Windows XP (32bit) ac97

For the hard disk and network cards, choose libvirt. You will need to download the libvirt iso image from Fedora. When you get to the point of choosing a drive to install Windows 7 onto, you will need to insert the image using virt-manager
When it finds the libvirt drivers, choose the one for Windows 7 32bit or 64bit as appropriate. Reinsert the Windows 7 image into virt-manager.

Log into your server and change the xml for your virtual machine replacing the graphics and video sections.

After installing Windows, open up device manager (right click on my computer -> Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager). Right click on any devices that are found and don’t have device drivers installed (yellow exclamation mark on them) and update the drivers. Choose the drivers on the libvirt iso image.

Okay. Almost done. If you try to play any audio, it will play but you won’t hear anything. Why? It seems that the QXL video driver is needed for sound to play remotely on the Spice client.

I’ve had trouble with the WIN32 QXL driver qxl_unstable.zip starting correctly in Windows XP and Vista although I haven’t had a problem with Windows 7 (32bit). With Windows 7 64bit, no binary drivers are provided. I can only suspect that because Windows 7 64bit requires properly signed drivers, the developers opted not to manage the signing themselves. So, I built the drivers for Windows XP (32bit), Windows 2008 (64bit), Windows 7 (32bit) and Windows 7 (64bit) yesterday.

Right click on “SpiceTestCert.cer” and install it to accept the driver. Next update the VGA driver with the corresponding driver.

Note that since these were signed by me and not an actual company, you may need to force Windows 7 (64bit) to allow the driver to be loaded. See Installing Unsigned Drivers in Windows 7 by Trish Perry for three different methods. When you restart the vm, you should now hear sound if you’re using Spice.

The same method will work for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. I haven’t tried with Windows 8 yet.

We watch movies and TV shows upstairs primarily streamed from a Windows 7 Media Center machine through an XBox 360. When I we ran out of room on the Drobo, I moved the movies to an Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 (Linux) stored on a RAID5 array (samba share).

Since I’m using My Movies for media management, I updated the MYMOVIES database (SQL Server 2005) with the new location. I used the host name of the Ubuntu server. After verifying that the guest user on the Ubuntu server was set up correctly in the /etc/samba/smb.conf, I was able to watch the videos in local playback via Media Center.

After a bit of trial and error, I was able to determine that the XBox 360 didn’t quite like the netbios broadcast from the Ubuntu server (samba). Making it use a static ip made it work when I updated the nvcLocation from “ultra” to “192.168.0.133” in the tblDiscs table (MYMOVIES database). It should be noted direct manipulation of the tables is unsupported by the My Movies software but it worked just fine.